Top all-time · #2127
SurrealDB
Company blog · surrealdb.com/blogdataprogramming
SurrealDB is the company blog at surrealdb.com, writing about data and programming. Since 2022, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
SurrealDB's site presents its multi-model document-graph database, with features, docs, a benchmark write-up and a license page. HN commenters mostly point to it as a product reference.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
SurrealDB is a multi-model database and an Agent Memory layer: one engine for your application's data and durable, provable memory for your AI agents.
Most-linked posts?
- SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-08-22
- SurrealDB, a graph-relational database on top of TiKV5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-08-22
- VART: A Persistent Data Structure for Snapshot Isolation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-23
- /community2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-08-22
- Surrealdb2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-04-23
- /license2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-08-22
- /blog/beginning-our-benchmarking-journey2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-21
- /opensource2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-22
- Why SurrealDB is going to kill Elasticsearch2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-12
What Hacker News says?
> You can see the results and links to our code in the write-up here: https://surrealdb.com/blog/beginning-our-benchmarking-journe ... page says your benchmark runs on 5M of records only. Is it incredibly small dataset in current world, and is it more micro-benchmarking? Also, count(*) query having 5s latency on 5m records is very underwhelming if I understand your tables correctly.
Comment linking /blog/beginning-our-benchmarking-journe
on “Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)”Submitted SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web as a story · 190 points
HN discussionHey George, Alexander from SurrealDB here. Congratulations on the launch! This is a very exciting space, and it's great to see your take on it. Running fair benchmarks, not benchmarketing, is a significant effort and we recently put in this effort to make things as fair and transparent as possible across a range of databases. You can see the results and links to our code in the write-up here: https://surrealdb.com/b…
Comment linking /blog/beginning-our-benchmarking-journey
on “Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)”Submitted SurrealDB 3.0: Improved stability, performance, and tooling as a story · 17 points
HN discussionBenchmarking is here: https://surrealdb.com/blog/beginning-our-benchmarking-journe...
Comment linking /blog/beginning-our-benchmarking-journey
on “Build your own SQLite in Rust, Part 5: Evaluating queries”Submitted What's New in Surrealist 3.4 as a story · 13 points
HN discussionHi yawnxyz - absolutely we intend to have support for Svelte in due course! We aren't Svelte users ourselves, so any suggestions or ideas are very welcome! Do let us know in the community - https://surrealdb.com/community
Comment linking /community
on “SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web”Submitted Announcing SurrealDB 2.0 as a story · 12 points
HN discussionHi AtNightWeCode, we're just a team of 2 developers at the moment, and completely bootstrapped. This is only our initial release, and we have a long journey ahead of us. We realise there is lots of work to do. It would be great to get an understanding of what you mean in more depth :) ! With regards to scalability and high-availability, in distributed mode you run SurrealDB on top of TiKV (and soon FoundationDB), so…
Comment linking /opensource
on “SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web”Submitted Network Capabilities in Surreal Cloud as a story · 10 points
HN discussionHi gardenfelder, we've got a whole page on our site explaining the thought process and our intentions around the license - https://surrealdb.com/license !
Comment linking /license
on “SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web”Submitted SurrealDB 2.0 as a story · 8 points
HN discussionHi lovasoa thanks for your comment! We did try to stay as open as possible, but unfortunately the license (as you noted) is not an actual OSI approved license. We've got a whole page about why we chose this license, what the limitations are, and how we are contributing to open source ( https://surrealdb.com/license ). Effectively though we didn't want to limit the database usage in anyway except for preventing peopl…
Comment linking /license
on “SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web”Submitted SurrealDB Agent Memory: 77% on Beam, Alternative to Mem0 / Honcho / Cognee as a story · 7 points
HN discussionHi packetlost this is a really interesting topic to me. I wrote my MSc thesis on this exact topic - https://surrealdb.com/static/whitepaper.pdf ! I've learnt a lot since writing this thesis, and would have many different opinions if I wrote it today, but very interested in this area of research!
Comment linking /static/whitepaper.pdf
on “SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web”Submitted SurrealKV: A RocksDB replacement written in Rust as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThank you CSDude. We wanted SurrealDB to basically be open source, but with the only limitation of not being able to provide a Database as a Service platform. So in a business or enterprise use, there is no limit at all. You can run SurrealDB with as many nodes as you want, and as many users as you want; you can provide a hosted database internally, or to employees, contractors, or subsidiary companies. The only lim…
Comment linking /license
on “SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web”Submitted VART: A Persistent Data Structure for Snapshot Isolation as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHi mackeyja92 great suggestion! We're not big Erlang/Elixir users, but we definitely want to integrate with Elixir and LiveView in due course! We actually received a suggestion to do this just yesterday! We would love to hear any suggestions or ideas in this area. Let us know in whatever way you want ( https://surrealdb.com/community )!
Comment linking /community
on “SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web”Submitted Ingesting data into SurrealDB using Fivetran as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHi jxi thanks for the question! Our plan is to make SurreealDB accessible and usable from as many codebases/platforms/architectures as possible. We've got plans for integration into all of the big IDEs down the line, so we absolutely will add IntelliJ and DataGrip to the list. We'll definitely want to get as much feedback in this area when we get to it, so do join the community ( https://surrealdb.com/community ) as…
Comment linking /community
on “SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web”Submitted SurrealDB launches new DBaaS offering, Surreal Cloud as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSource : https://github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb Features : https://surrealdb.com/features
Comment linking /features
on “SurrealDB – Document-graph database, for the realtime web”Submitted Understanding SurrealQL and how it is different from PostgreSQL as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHi johnwoods - Tobie founder of SurrealDB here. We're updating our website so it's clearer, but in the meantime, the best page to see the current functionality is our features page https://surrealdb.com/features We're also looking to improve our roadmap page soon, which will detail everything we're working on and planning to work on in the near term, and in the future!
Comment linking /features
on “SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web”Submitted Why SurrealDB is going to kill Elasticsearch as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHi user1029384756 - Tobie here, founder of SurrealDB. It's just a team of 2 of us at the moment, with the intention to grow the team very soon! At the moment (as you have noted) the underlying storage engine is RocksDB (in single mode) or TiKV (in distributed mode), however, although we will always support deployment on top of these solutions, we intend to add our own embedded and distributed key-value stores in due…
Comment linking /features
on “SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web”Submitted SurrealDB is hiring: join us and help redefine database technology as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHi user1029384756 - Tobie here, founder of SurrealDB. We do plan to support GraphQL integration soon (hopefully before our final 1.0 version). Our features page https://surrealdb.com/features is the best place to see what is built, and what we intend to build in due course! Hope this helps!
Comment linking /features
on “SurrealDB: Distributed document-graph database for the realtime web”Submitted SurrealDB 3.1: stability, DiskANN, and a new release process as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
